Sleep deprivation
Sleep deprivation has been a common method for me achieving altered states of conciousness. I have Narcolepsy so sleep deprivation comes naturally and I can even experience it with a normally healthy sleep schedule. Stress plays a huge factor in how much narcolepsy affects me. Under low to moderate stess I can get by with an average of nine hours of sleep a night and an hour or two nap in the afternoon without medication. When I am under high stress situation, or I have not been averaging 10-12 hours of sleep a day for a while, no amount of sleep is sufficient without medication. The sleep study that was performed on me showed that I spend nearly 90% of my time sleeping in REM and enter REM between 30 seconds and 2 minutes after falling asleep; this was performed during a high stress time though, I don't expect one performed during a more moderate stress period to be quite so bad. Typically (under low to moderate stress) after around 15 hours of being awake, I will begin to hear a voice talking to me. It's usually not very clear and usually doesn't say much that's very interesting. Sometimes it knows where I put my keys that I can't find, or reminds me to pick up milk while I'm at the supermarket but at that level of sleep deprivation there is not much profound going on. After around 20 hours of being awake, I start hearing a couple (2-3) distinct voices and I begin seeing something like wavy lines in the air around me and shadows on the wall that seem to move. The voices at this point typically speak in sentence fragments, so its not really passible to have a meaningful conversation. The wavy lines sometimes seem to have some places where they are more dense and the shadows on the walls seem to exist and move without there being a reason for there to be a shadow on the wall in that spot in the first place. After 24 hours, things typically pick up rather rapidly. The wavy lines start to give way to translucent figures, the number of voices increases to typcially between 5 and 7 and I start hearing complete sentences from them. By 30 hours I have begun experiencing what I call a scenario, a sort of scripted sequence of events that repeats many times with slight differences each time it is experienced. Its also around this time that I no longer feel the need to sleep. Eventually either "normal" life calls me back or I do finally feel the need to sleep, either way in my altered state of conscious I usually experience this as a scenario parameter. Typically once I start sleeping again it takes around three days of 10-12 hours of sleep each day to return to my normal state of consciousness, during that time I hear voices and see figures less and less, eventually going back to a single voice talking in sentence fragments and seeing only some wavy lines then back to not hearing any voices and not seeing wavy lines at all. Category:Methods of reaching altered states of consciousness